Commercially-produced software has traditionally been made available under a license that defines the permissible terms of the software's use. When the practice of software licensing first began, the license generally took the form of a legal document that defined the user's rights with respect to the software. Such a document relied upon the legal system for enforcement. It has since become desirable for licenses to be enforced electronically—i.e., it is desirable that a computer program contain code that actively discourages or prevents use of the software in a manner that is contrary to the license.
Most software that provides for electronic license enforcement provides its own infrastructure to manage the licensing of the software and the use of the licenses. Thus, a typical commercial software product may include not only the code to perform the product's core function, but may also carry with it the code to obtain, evaluate, protect, and manage licenses for the software. For each software vendor to develop and incorporate this infrastructure into its software is often a wasteful duplication of effort. It is therefore desirable to provide a system that performs the basic functions related to software licensing, where the system can be used by a broad variety of software applications in a uniform and defined way.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for a mechanism that overcomes the drawbacks of the prior art.